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fuzzy said:
> My question (and partial rant) is this:
> why do the "publishers" need to
> scan a pbook to generate an e-book?
> Hasn't the industry switched to digital?
well, of course they've switched to digital.
however, their workflow is still targeted at
creating paper-books, not electronic-books.
and creating paper-books is often piecemeal,
in the sense that they will "run out a page"
when they need to make a correction to it,
and not use the file containing the whole book.
indeed, they might not even _have_ one file
which contains the entire book, since they
might have had each chapter in its own file.
indeed, because separate chapters might
come in from the author at different times,
and/or be sent out to different copy-editors,
or desktop-publishers, they might not even be
created in the same _program_. one might be
done in quark, another in indesign, and another
in ms-word. some might be sent to people who
can do illustrations, while others don't need that.
some pages will be done independently because
they have illustrations which require color-seps...
so it's usually just a big mish-mash. sometimes,
it's a miracle that the book comes together at all.
and yeah, that's a real stupid way to work, but
things can be too fragmented to do otherwise...
and the truth is _most_ publishers are like that.
when they started their "look inside the book"
program at amazon, they quickly discovered
that scanning an actual physical copy was the
best way to get their coherent digital version.
sad but true...
-bowerbird
p.s. of course, this doesn't excuse the fact that
it's just poor form to not even do a _spellcheck_
on your o.c.r. output. that's just sloppy work...
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